“I’m sure sleep was involved,” I said after he found it necessary to snatch my hand and hold it away for a few minutes. My hip free, I pressed the length of my body against him. His body responded, and my face showed my satisfaction at the reaction. “No one can talk all night.”

  “Ah, but vampires don’t need to sleep,” he reminded me, just before he pulled back, bent his head, and planted a kiss below my breastbone.

  I grabbed his head and lifted it. “There’s only one vampire in this bed. Is this how you imagine you’ll keep me awake?”

  “I’ve been imagining little else from the first moment I saw you.” Matthew’s eyes shone darkly as he lowered his head. My body arched up to meet his mouth. When it did, he gently but firmly turned me onto my back, grabbing both of my wrists in his right hand and pinning them to the pillow.

  Matthew shook his head. “No rushing, remember?”

  I was accustomed to the kind of sex that involved a physical release without needless delay or unnecessary emotional complications. As an athlete who spent much of my time with other athletes, I was well acquainted with my body and its needs, and there was usually someone around to help me fill them. I was never casual about sex or my choice of partners, but most of my experiences had been with men who shared my frank attitude and were content to enjoy a few ardent encounters and then return to being friends again as though nothing had happened.

  Matthew was making it clear that those days and nights were over. With him there would be no more straightforward sex—and I’d had no other kind. I might as well be a virgin. My deep feelings for him were becoming inextricably bound with my body’s responses, his fingers and mouth tying them together in complicated, agonizing knots.

  “We have all the time we need,” he said stroking the undersides of my arms with his fingertips, weaving love and physical longing together until my body felt tight.

  Matthew proceeded to study me with the rapt attention of a cartographer who found himself on the shores of a new world. I tried to keep up with him, wanting to discover his body while he was discovering mine, but he held my wrists firmly against the pillows. When I began to complain in earnest about the unfairness of this situation, he found an effective way to silence me. His cool fingers dipped between my legs and touched the only inches of my body that remained uncharted.

  “Matthew,” I breathed, “I don’t think that’s bundling.”

  “It is in France,” he said complacently, a wicked gleam in his eye. He let go of my wrists, convinced quite rightly that there would be no attempts to squirm away now, and I caught his face in my hands. We kissed each other, long and deep, while my legs opened like the covers of a book. Matthew’s fingers coaxed, teased, and danced between them until the pleasure was so intense it left me shaking.

  He held me until the tremors subsided and my heart returned to its normal rhythm. When I finally mustered the energy to look at him, he had the self-satisfied look of a cat.

  “What are the historian’s thoughts on bundling now?” he asked.

  “It’s far less wholesome than it’s been made out to be in the scholarly literature,” I said, touching his lips with my fingers. “And if this is what the Amish do at night, it’s no wonder they don’t need television.”

  Matthew chuckled, the look of contentment never leaving his face. “Are you sleepy now?” he asked, trailing his fingers through my hair.

  “Oh, no.” I pushed him over onto his back. He folded his hands beneath his head and looked up at me with another grin. “Not in the slightest. Besides, it’s my turn.”

  I studied him with the same intensity that he’d lavished on me. While I was inching up his hip bone, a white shadow in the shape of a triangle caught my attention. It was deep under the surface of his smooth, perfect skin. Frowning, I looked across the expanse of his chest. There were more odd marks, some shaped like snowflakes, others in crisscrossing lines. None of them were on the skin, though. They were all deep within him.

  “What is this, Matthew?” I touched a particularly large snowflake under his left collarbone.

  “It’s just a scar,” he said, craning his neck to see. “That one was made by the tip of a broadsword. The Hundred Years’ War, maybe? I can’t remember.”

  I slithered up his body to get a better look, pressing my warm skin against him, and he sighed happily.

  “A scar? Turn over.”

  He made little sounds of pleasure while my hands swept across his back.

  “Oh, Matthew.” My worst fears were realized. There were dozens, if not hundreds, of marks. I knelt and pulled the sheet down to his feet. They were on his legs, too.

  His head swiveled over his shoulder. “What’s wrong?” The sight of my face was answer enough, and he turned over and sat up. “It’s nothing, mon coeur. Just my vampire body, holding on to trauma.”

  “There are so many of them.” There was another one, on the swell of muscles where his arm met his shoulders.

  “I said vampires were difficult to kill. Creatures try their best to do so anyway.”

  “Did it hurt when you were wounded?”

  “You know I feel pleasure. Why not pain, too? Yes, they hurt. But they healed quickly.”

  “Why haven’t I seen them before?”

  “The light has to be just right, and you have to look carefully. Do they bother you?” Matthew asked hesitantly.

  “The scars themselves?” I shook my head. “No, of course not. I just want to hunt down all the people who gave them to you.”

  Like Ashmole 782, Matthew’s body was a palimpsest, its bright surface obscuring the tale of him hinted at by all those scars. I shivered at the thought of the battles Matthew had already fought, in wars declared and undeclared.

  “You’ve fought enough.” My voice shook with anger and remorse. “No more.”

  “It’s a bit late for that, Diana. I’m a warrior.”

  “No you’re not,” I said fiercely. “You’re a scientist.”

  “I’ve been a warrior longer. I’m hard to kill. Here’s the proof.” He gestured at his long white body. As evidence of his indestructibility, the scars were strangely comforting. “Besides, most creatures who wounded me are long gone. You’ll have to set that desire aside.”

  “Whatever will I replace it with?” I pulled the sheets over my head like a tent. Then there was silence except for an occasional gasp from Matthew, the crackle of the logs in the fireplace, and in time his own cry of pleasure. Tucking myself under his arm, I hooked my leg over his. Matthew looked down at me, one eye opened and one closed.

  “Is this what they’re teaching at Oxford these days?” he asked.

  “It’s magic. I was born knowing how to make you happy.” My hand rested on his heart, pleased that I instinctively understood where and how to touch him, when to be gentle and when to leave my passion unchecked.

  “If it is magic, then I’m even more delighted to be sharing the rest of my life with a witch,” he said, sounding as content as I felt.

  “You mean the rest of my life, not the rest of yours.”

  Matthew was suspiciously quiet, and I pushed myself up to see his expression. “Tonight I feel thirty-seven. Even more important, I believe that next year I will feel thirty-eight.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said uneasily.

  He drew me back down and tucked my head under his chin. “For more than a thousand years, I’ve stood outside of time, watching the days and years go by. Since I’ve been with you, I’m aware of its passage. It’s easy for vampires to forget such things. It’s one of the reasons Ysabeau is so obsessed with reading the newspapers—to remind herself that there’s always change, even though time doesn’t alter her.”

  “You’ve never felt this way before?”

  “A few times, very fleetingly. Once or twice in battle, when I feared I was about to die.”

  “So it’s about danger, not just love.” A cold wisp of fear moved through me at this matter-of-fact talk of war and death.

  “My life now has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Everything before was preamble. Now I have you. One day you will be gone, and my life will be over.”

  “Not necessarily,” I said hastily. “I’ve only got another handful of decades in me—you could go on forever.” A world without Matthew was unthinkable.

  “We’ll see,” he said quietly, stroking my shoulder.

  Suddenly his safety was of paramount concern to me. “You will be careful?”

  “No one sees as many centuries as I have without being careful. I’m always careful. Now more than ever, since I have so much more to lose.”

  “I would rather have had this moment with you—just this one night—than centuries with someone else,” I whispered.

  Matthew considered my words. “I suppose if it’s taken me only a few weeks to feel thirty-seven again, I might be able to reach the point where one moment with you was enough,” he said, cuddling me closer. “But this talk is too serious for a marriage bed.”

  “I thought conversation was the point of bundling,” I said primly.

  “It depends on whom you ask—the bundlers or those being bundled.” He began working his mouth down from my ear to my shoulders. “Besides, I have another part of the medieval wedding service I’d like to discuss with you.”

  “You do, husband?” I bit his ear gently as it moved past.

  “Don’t do that,” he said, with mock severity. “No biting in bed.” I did it again anyway. “What I was referring to was the part of the ceremony where the obedient wife,” he said, looking at me pointedly, “promises to be ‘bonny and buxom in bed and board.’ How do you intend to fulfill that promise?” He buried his face in my breasts as if he might find the answer there.

  After several more hours discussing the medieval liturgy, I had a new appreciation for church ceremonies as well as folk customs. And being with him in this way was more intimate than I’d ever been with another creature.

  Relaxed and at ease, I curled against Matthew’s now-familiar body so that my head rested below his heart. His fingers ran through my hair again and again, until I fell asleep.

  It was just before dawn when I awoke to a strange sound coming from the bed next to me, like gravel rolling around in a metal tube.

  Matthew was sleeping—and snoring, too. He looked even more like the effigy of a knight on a tombstone now. All that was missing was the dog at his feet and the sword clasped at his waist.

  I pulled the covers over him. He didn’t stir. I smoothed his hair back, and he kept breathing deeply. I kissed him lightly on the mouth, and there was still no reaction. I smiled at my beautiful vampire, sleeping like the dead, and felt like the luckiest creature on the planet as I crept from under the covers.

  Outside, the clouds were still hanging in the sky, but at the horizon they were thin enough to reveal faint traces of red behind the gray layers. It might actually clear today, I thought, stretching slightly and looking back at Matthew’s recumbent form. He would be unconscious for hours. I, on the other hand, was feeling restless and oddly rejuvenated. I dressed quickly, wanting to go outside in the gardens and be by myself for a while.

  When I finished dressing, Matthew was still lost in his rare, peaceful slumber. “I’ll be back before you know it,” I whispered, kissing him.

  There was no sign of Marthe, or of Ysabeau. In the kitchen I took an apple from the bowl set aside for the horses and bit into it. The apple’s crisp flesh tasted bright against my tongue.

  I drifted into the garden, walking along the gravel paths, drinking in the smells of herbs and the white roses that glowed in the early-morning light. If not for my modern clothes, it could have been in the sixteenth century, with the orderly square beds and the willow fences that were supposed to keep the rabbits out—though the château’s vampire occupants were no doubt a better deterrent than a scant foot of bent twigs.

  Reaching down, I ran my fingers over the herbs growing at my feet. One of them was in Marthe’s tea. Rue, I realized with satisfaction, pleased that the knowledge had stuck.

  A gust of wind brushed past me, pulling loose the same infernal lock of hair that would not stay put. My fingers scraped it back in place, just as an arm swept me off the ground.

  Ears popping, I was rocketed straight up into the sky.

  The gentle tingle against my skin told me what I already knew.

  When my eyes opened, I would be looking at a witch.

  Chapter 29

  My captor’s eyes were bright blue, angled over high, strong cheekbones and topped by a shock of platinum hair. She was wearing a thick, hand-knit turtleneck and a pair of tight-fitting jeans. No black robes or brooms, but she was—unmistakably—a witch.

  With a contemptuous flick of her fingers, she stopped the sound of my scream before it broke free. Her arm swept to the left, carrying us more horizontally than vertically for the first time since she’d plucked me from the garden at Sept-Tours.

  Matthew would wake up and find me gone. He would never forgive himself for falling asleep, or me for going outside. Idiot, I told myself.

  “Yes you are, Diana Bishop,” the witch said in a strangely accented voice.

  I slammed shut the imaginary doors behind my eyes that had always kept out the casual, invasive efforts of witches and daemons.

  She laughed, a silvery sound that chilled me to the bone. Frightened, and hundreds of feet above the Auvergne, I emptied my mind in hopes of leaving nothing for her to find once she breached my inadequate defenses. Then she dropped me.

  As the ground flew up, my thoughts organized themselves around a single word—Matthew.

  The witch caught me up in her grip at my first whiff of earth. “You’re too light to carry for one who can’t fly. Why won’t you, I wonder?”

  Silently I recited the kings and queens of England to keep my mind blank.

  She sighed. “I’m not your enemy, Diana. We are both witches.”

  The winds changed as the witch flew south and west, away from Sept-Tours. I quickly grew disoriented. The blaze of light in the distance might be Lyon, but we weren’t headed toward it. Instead we were moving deeper into the mountains—and they didn’t look like the peaks Matthew had pointed out to me earlier.

  We descended toward something that looked like a crater set apart from the surrounding countryside by yawning ravines and overgrown forests. It proved to be the ruin of a medieval castle, with high walls and thick foundations that extended deep into the earth. Trees grew inside the husks of long-abandoned buildings huddled in the fortress’s shadow. The castle didn’t have a single graceful line or pleasing feature. There was only one reason for its existence—to keep out anyone who wished to enter. The poor dirt roads leading over the mountains were the castle’s only link to the rest of the world. My heart sank.

  The witch swung her feet down and pointed her toes, and when I didn’t do the same, she forced mine down with another flick of her fingers. The tiny bones complained at the invisible stress. We slid along what remained of the gray tiled roofs without touching them, headed toward a small central courtyard. My feet flattened out suddenly and slammed into the stone paving, the shock reverberating through my legs.

  “In time you’ll learn to land more softly,” the witch said matter-of-factly.

  It was impossible to process my change in circumstances. Just moments ago, it seemed, I had been lying, drowsy and content, in bed with Matthew. Now I was standing in a dank castle with a strange witch.

  When two pale figures detached themselves from the shadows, my confusion turned to terror. One was Domenico Michele. The other was unknown to me, but the freezing touch of his eyes told me he was a vampire, too. A wave of incense and brimstone identified him: this was Gerbert of Aurillac, the vampire-pope.

  Gerbert wasn’t physically intimidating, but there was evil at the core of him that made me shrink instinctively. Traces of that darkness were in brown eyes that looked out from deep sockets set over cheekbones so prominent that the skin appeared to be stretched thin over them. His nose hooked slightly, pointing down to thin lips that were curled into a cruel smile. With this vampire’s dark eyes pinned on me, the threat posed by Peter Knox paled in comparison.

  “Thank you for this place, Gerbert,” the witch said smoothly, keeping me close by her side. “You’re right—I won’t be disturbed here.”

  “It was my pleasure, Satu. May I examine your witch?” Gerbert asked softly, walking slowly to the left and right as if searching for the best vantage point from which to view a prize. “It is difficult, when she has been with de Clermont, to tell where her scents begin and his end.”

  My captor glowered at the reference to Matthew. “Diana Bishop is in my care now. There is no need for your presence here any longer.”

  Gerbert’s attention remained fixed on me as he took small, measured steps toward me. His exaggerated slowness only heightened his menace. “It is a strange book, is it not, Diana? A thousand years ago, I took it from a great wizard in Toledo. When I brought it to France, it was already bound by layers of enchantment.”

  “Despite your knowledge of magic, you could not discover its secrets.” The scorn in the witch’s voice was unmistakable. “The manuscript is no less bewitched now than it was then. Leave this to us.”

  He continued to advance. “I knew a witch then whose name was similar to yours—Meridiana. She didn’t want to help me unlock the manuscript’s secrets, of course. But my blood kept her in thrall.” He was close enough now that the cold emanating from his body chilled me. “Each time I drank from her, small insights into her magic and fragments of her knowledge passed to me. They were frustratingly fleeting, though. I had to keep going back for more. She became weak, and easy to control.” Gerbert’s finger touched my face. “Meridiana’s eyes were rather like yours, too. What did you see, Diana? Will you share it with me?”

  “Enough, Gerbert.” Satu’s voice crackled with warning, and Domenico snarled.